On the “Nightline” edition of the health care forum, Gibson read the president a letter from Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee expressing concern about the creation of a government-run health care plan.

“At a time when major government programs like Medicare and Medicaid are already on a path to fiscal insolvency, creating a brand new government program will not only worsen our long-term financial outlook but also negatively impact American families who enjoy the private coverage of their choice,” the senators wrote.

“The end result would be a federal government takeover of our health care system, taking decisions out of the hands of doctors and patients and placing them in the hands of a Washington bureaucracy.”

“They’re wrong,” the president said, arguing that in a Health Insurance Exchange, the public plan would be “one option among multiple options.”

The concern, Gibson articulated, is that such a plan wouldn’t be offered on a level playing field.

The president rebuffed that, arguing that “we can set up a public option where they’re collecting premiums just like any private insurer and doctors can collect rates,” but because the public plan will have lower administrative costs “we can keep them [private insurance companies] honest.”

Obama said he didn’t understand those advocates of the free market who constantly say the private sector can do things better and are yet worried about this plan.

“If that’s the case, no one will choose the public option,” the president said. He also suggested, however, that the private sector might not necessarily be better, point out that users of Medicare and Veterans Administration hospitals constantly rate “pretty high satisfaction.”

The fundamental dishonesty here is that the president refuses to acknowledge that the government option/public plan will be subsidized by the federal government in a number of ways and thus will be cheaper for employers to chose for their employees, and they will chose it, sending tens of millions of Americans now covered by private insurers into the public plan, dramatically driving up federal costs while crippling the private sector insurance industry. Once dumped into the plan, the employees will wonder what happened to the president’s promise –often repeated– that “if you like your plan you can keep it.”

This is the central dishonesty of the entire scheme: Democrats want to push through a giant bait-and-switch that will act as a giant magnet for employers. The quality of the care will be vastly inferior to that provided by the health care system of today, and as costs skyrocket, the control of those outlays will be imposed via rationing of services and the imposition of waiting lists.

If the plan was defensible, the president would defend it openly and at length rather than with absurd deflections like the phrase “keeping the private sector honest.”

Tens of millions of Americans will be stripped of the health insurance they currently have and with it many of their doctors if the Obama plan becomes law. They will be forced into a health care system that doesn’t exist and when it is built will be run by federal bureaucrats. That’s the truth of what is being pushed, and every congressman and senator who votes for this scheme should be tossed out of office in 17 months.